The CIO of Washington State’s Department Of Health is bringing IT to the COVID-19 battle.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached the U.S., Jennifer McNamara has been on the front line of efforts to contain it. The CIO of Washington State’s health department is also the commander of one of the state’s incident-management teams, spending every other week away from her usual office and instead overseeing a group at the public health laboratories in Shoreline that’s working on things like procuring sampling and testing kits.
Some other members of the department’s tech team, including Callie Goldsby, the deputy CIO, have also been mobilized to help with the state’s broader response effort. “It’s all hands on deck in these types of situations,” says McNamara. “Staff are packing up and living out of hotels to do whatever this incident might require of us.”
It still requires a great deal. Although the state is no longer the worst-impacted by the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S., it had 9,608 confirmed cases and had registered 446 deaths according to data posted by the health department for April 8, 2020. McNamara, Goldsby and the rest of the agency’s 166-person tech team have been moving fast to address issues that could hamper response efforts. Their experience shows just how valuable tech leaders’ unique mix of IT smarts, project-management expertise and ability to leverage supplier partnerships can be in a fast-moving crisis.
Taking the pain out of processes
The challenges have included an issue that might at first appear mundane, but which could have become a significant drain on resources if left unresolved. In her first stint as incident commander of the team at Shoreline in January, McNamara quickly realized people were spending far too much time putting together rosters of personnel, as well as managing payments, securing accommodation and other administrative tasks associated with their deployments. “All those things were happening manually, and it was labor-intensive and error-prone,” she recalls.
McNamara called Goldsby and asked her to come to the lab, along with several other members of the health department’s tech team. The group decided the best way to solve the issue was to develop a solution fast, based on a workflow-automation platform from ServiceNow, whose software they were already using. Goldsby says the company sent a couple of employees to help with analyzing the workflow and the application was built by the department’s own team of developers in just four weeks, going live in early March. ServiceNow has since made some other changes to it and has made it available for free to government agencies, along with several other emergency-response apps.
Another challenge facing McNamara’s team was establishing communications at temporary locations. The state quickly opened a number of emergency quarantine sites to cope with a growing wave of coronavirus cases and these needed wireless connectivity fast so that people could keep in touch with families and friends. To get it, the department turned to its existing supplier, Verizon, whose crisis center agreed to loan it multiple internet routers at no cost.
It’s leveraging a third existing relationship, this time with Microsoft, to scale out a temporary cloud environment through Azure to support data gathering associated with drive-through testing clinics, case investigations and contact-tracing, as well as data analysis of the coronavirus outbreak. The tech company is also helping the agency create more efficient digital workflows linked to acquiring and processing biological samples from patients at the state’s health labs.
Getting a green light to roll out new applications involving personal health data typically requires a lengthy review process with the office of the state’s top CIO. But McNamara was able to expedite approvals and to get her own department’s chief information security officer to do rapid risk assessments. “You have to move quickly in an outbreak response, but you cannot sacrifice private medical information,” she says.
Big data and a bigger cloud
While Microsoft has done its share of the work on a pro bono basis, the crisis has underlined the need for more investment in cloud capabilities at the health agency. It was already using some cloud services, such as ServiceNow’s, and was in the process of developing an initial cloud environment for its own needs, but it had been struggling to get sufficient support in the state legislature for a larger cloud budget.
The pandemic may well change politicians’ minds. McNamara is firmly convinced the cloud is an ideal environment to bring together very large data sets that include everything from opioid prescriptions to trauma records to help tackle health issues. And it can be especially helpful in tracking and evaluating rapidly evolving disease trends such as the spread of COVID-19. “It’s been difficult to get funding for an initiative like that, and yet it’s so necessary to respond to a crisis like this.”
The rush to tackle the pandemic has put the state health department’s tech team under immense pressure. Given this experience, what advice would McNamara give to other leaders guiding their staff through these uncertain times?
“One thing I tell my teams is: ‘slow is smooth and smooth is fast’,” she says. “Speed is important, but if people are moving too rapidly, they can miss the big picture and end up solving the wrong problems.” She also recommends clearly communicating priorities across multiple levels in an organization, and sharing credit for successes and celebrating team members’ accomplishments. “That is so important for motivation,” says McNamara, “because we are going to be in this for months.”